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Cal State Long Beach to offer Queer Studies minor

Jennifer Reed, an associate professor in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach, helped develop the university’s new Queer Studies minor. The 18-unit minor will be offered Fall 2013. Photo by Jeff Gritchen/Staff Photographer

LONG BEACH – Dina Perrone likes to talk about sex, specifically how laws are used to control, regulate and prohibit sex and sexuality.

For example, in her “Sex, Sexuality, Crime & Punishment” course Perrone, an assistant professor in Cal State Long Beach’s criminal justice department, will discuss Lawrence v. Texas, the United States Supreme Court’s 2003 landmark decision making gay and lesbian sexual activity legal in every state. The ruling struck down Texas’ sodomy law and also invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states.

“Sex, Sexuality, Crime & Punishment” will be one of the courses students can take toward the university’s new Queer Studies minor, which will be available Fall 2013.

The Lawrence ruling also applied to heterosexual people because in nine of those states, the sodomy laws made oral and anal sexual activity illegal for everyone. In the other four states, the laws only targeted gay and lesbians.

“The average of person doesn’t know that these moral laws, which are heavily influenced by religion, applied to everyone,” Perrone said. “These laws become a tool to regulate sex and sexuality. But even though they affect everyone they are enforced differently.

“Gay people have been targeted frequently and harshly,” she said.

The Queer Studies minor has been about two years in the making. It was developed by Jennifer Reed, an associate professor in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, and the university’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Task Force.

The 18-unit minor was approved last month by the Cal State Long Beach Academic Senate and earlier this month by the Cal State University Academic Senate.

“It’s important to expand the knowledge of our students,” Perrone said. “It’s important that students know what it’s like in the real world.”

The term queer should not offend people, Reed said.

“Queer is an accepted word in academia to talk about the range of sexuality and anything that challenges the norms of heterosexuality,” Reed said. “It’s bigger than just gay and lesbian.”

Students who enroll in the minor will be required to take Introduction to Queer Studies and Queering Gender and four electives.

Those courses will include Gender and Sexuality in Asian America; American Indian Genders and Sexualities; Critical Issues in Chicana and Latina Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Desire in World History Context; and Reproductive Justice.

Cal State Long Beach joins a growing list of universities offering minors in queer or LGBT studies, including Cal State Northridge, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Cal State Fullerton and San Francisco State. San Diego State offers a major and minor in LGBT studies.

“We’re kind of behind,” Reed said. “It’s kind of embarrassing.

“We haven’t received any resistance,” she said. “You get overworked and over extended. You just have to do it.”